How to Quickly Validate Your Product or Service Online
Sometimes you need to make sure a particular product or service has potential to perform well in terms of sales before you invest any amount of time and money into it.
While SEO is attractive because it can drive traffic around the clock and you aren’t paying per visitor/click to your website, it’s not going to allow you to get a large sample size of traffic instantly.
When you want to validate an idea to see if it’s worth pursuing or has merit, then you need instant traffic that consists of targeted visitors that are likely to have an interest in whatever it is you are selling.
Here are the three easiest and most effective ways to get targeted traffic to your offers right away and quickly learn if you have a winner or something worth abandoning before you sink too much time and money into something that realistically doesn’t stand a chance.
Run a Google Ads PPC Campaign
If whatever it is that you are selling doesn’t have people actively seeking it on Google than it’s dead in the water. Getting found via organic searches can take time, but anyone can launch a Google Adwords campaign and attract traffic right away by targeting the correct keywords.
Down the road your pay per click campaigns can become more advanced, but in the initial test you want to target the most obvious keywords someone would search when looking to buy your product or service.
Don’t worry about optimizing for click costs just yet. You want to first make sure your target market even has an interest in your offer. A lot of things come into play, like the price, for example. If your offer isn’t going to convert via the most obvious keywords it’s unlikely to convert via other keywords.
Buy Banner Ads on Relevant Websites
If you are selling a makeup brush kit for example, then a popular beauty blog would be a great place to attract potential buyers. Contact the blog and work out a deal for a banner spot. You can get banner created fairly cheap.
See if you can secure a good position for a week. Make sure to track traffic in Google Analytics and set up goals to see how the source performs. A great ad creative will pull a higher click through rate, so make sure you don’t put up an ad that is boring.
Launch Facebook and Instagram Ads
Facebook and Instagram ads both operate from the same platform and it gives you access to the best targeting options. There isn’t a business that can’t target their ideal customer using these social media networks.
Come up with creative ads that show the audience what problem and pain point your product or service solves. You can then set daily and weekly budgets to gather as much data as possible.
This is really the most powerful testing option, because you have access to almost the entire world’s population. If something doesn’t sell or receive positive feedback from Facebook ads then it’s going to be a difficult road ahead.